Background on Choose Networks

Chris: Choose Networks is a managed services provider of innovative and value-generating IT solutions. Most of our customers are small businesses with 15 to 75 employees and based in Kansas. Our clientele consists mostly of business owners, office managers, and partners. In addition to marketing and sales departments, Choose also runs on the talent of IT, audiovisual, bookkeeping, accounting, and HR professionals.

Zak: As the owner and president of Choose, you must wear a bunch of hats. What are your main areas of responsibility?

Chris: I fill the visionary role, helping to map out strategic goals, establish a healthy company culture, and lead our sales and marketing efforts.

Running Sales & Marketing at Choose Networks

Zak: What is your approach to marketing, both for your company and your customers?

Chris: For 13 years our marketing was all word-of-mouth. Over the last three years we’ve completely changed that so that all of our new business gets acquired by direct touch -- marketing events, direct mail, phone call follow-ups, leads generated by SEO, and web page content thanks to Robin Robins and her Technology Marketing Toolkit.

Zak: Which systems help you run sales and marketing?

Chris: We run our sales process with Infusionsoft, tracking prospects and which campaigns generate sales. Infusionsoft also assists us with creating landing pages and our call follow-up process.

Once our sales team closes a deal, Connectwise acts as our customer database for tracking tickets, managing invoices, and aligning customer resources with our internal documentation and other tools.

Scaling Sales & Marketing with Infusionsoft & Connectwise

Zak: What was the impetus that led you to go with ConnectWise and Infusionsoft together?

Chris: We’ve been longtime users of ConnectWise, and we added Infusionsoft as we began working with Robin Robins to scale marketing. I knew that an integration would be necessary to keep sales & marketing working together cohesively. We had seven years of data in ConnectWise at that point, so we needed to bring the right data over to Infusionsoft for marketing purposes.

The goal was for the relevant marketing data from Connectwise to sync with the relevant sales data in Infusionsoft, and then also have marketing and sales data managed in Infusionsoft feed directly to ConnectWise. When our customer hires a new employee, we want them to know who we are without us having to re-enter data or manually getting this data out of the sales and marketing tool into our customer tool.

Zak: How did you end up deciding to use Bedrock Data?

Chris: A lot of the tools we tried didn’t have the control we needed around managing the data between ConnectWise and Infusionsoft. We didn’t want a full sync of Connectwise data into Infusionsoft and vice versa. It was critical for us that the marketing system and CRM do their jobs without cluttering either system with unnecessary data. We only wanted certain kinds of potential prospects in Connectwise.

After I came across Bedrock, I set up a demo and worked with Bedrock’s onboarding and customer success teams, who were great. We’d say, “I want this phone number to populate this field” and so far we haven’t encountered anything that the Sync can’t do.

Zak: What is the overall flow of data for you now with Bedrock Data?

Chris: We use Bedrock for a lot of tasks that save us tons of time. For instance, we may want the main company phone number in Connectwise to be the contact number in Infusionsoft. Bedrock helps us store the most recent phone number, rather than an old cell phone or a number from a prior company.

Also, since Infusionsoft is very contact focused, we needed Bedrock to help us avoid moving an entire company record over, as some of those records might lack a phone number. Bedrock Data populates the most recent account phone numbers from Connectwise and creates mappings for contacts, accounts, and opportunities so that when a lead syncs from Infusionsoft to Connectwise, our sales people see that data in Connectwise once the prospect has been converted into a customer.

Zak: What are the benefits of having Bedrock Data in place?

Chris: Bedrock’s gotten us to the point where we can start using Infusionsoft for marketing. It’s given us the ability to go into Connectwise and manage which prospect contacts should get pushed over to Infusionsoft so we can manage our marketing campaigns there. Eventually, we’ll be able to to completely control our sales process within Infusionsoft and only push data into Connectwise once that data is operational.

By helping us run sales and marketing much more effectively, we’ve saved hundreds of hours of work and having manually get phone numbers. For a small-medium business, that’s huge. We can run double the campaigns and generate twice as many leads into sales.

We’re also still working with Robin Robins to create our campaigns and content. The combination of Infusionsoft, Robin Robins, and Bedrock Data has given us a solid marketing foundation and the data we need to catapult sales.